"Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events."

Hint #1: Doyle McManus wrote about it in his Los Angeles Times op-ed Sunday, describing the powerful engine of pressure on the GOP to move way to the right and away from any compromise with President Obama. Hint #2: Raffy "Ted" Cruz is their (big, loony, alienating) mouthpiece, but he's no leader:

"There's no question in my mind that I have more influence now on public policy than I did as an individual senator," [president of Washington's Heritage Foundation, former Sen. Jim] DeMint told NPR recently.

It was Heritage Action that focused tea party conservatives in the House on the idea of using this fall's long-scheduled votes on federal spending to try to "defund" Obamacare, and the group then organized a summer-long campaign (starring Cruz) to publicize the idea. [...]

The drive to defund Obamacare hasn't accomplished much so far, but that doesn't appear to worry Heritage Action's 31-year-old CEO, Michael A. Needham, who said last week that the group's long-term goal was to transform the GOP, which he called "the allegedly conservative party." The government shutdown, he insisted, was a step on "a path to electoral success."